The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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At the same time, a lot of people who are naturally muscular from heavy manual labor aren’t lifting ‘to failure’ when they’re stacking crates or moving machinery, they’re just doing a ‘lot of reps’.
manual labor does not make you much stronger, more like stronger people attracted to manual labor
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I don't know how true that is. I myself am a laborer, and I work alongside other laborers - they tend to be physically fit, but only to the extent that the job selects for physically active young men. We have slender twinks and dad bods, and the guys with great physiques all go to the gym on top of whatever we do at work. It's not that manual labour doesn't do anything - even jogging and stretching have been shown to work as muscle stimulus in people who are totally untrained, so any level of physical activity is better than nothing. But if you carry 10kg boxes around for work, your body will adapt, and eventually you will find it no longer works as stimulus even when you do it for forty hours a week. Endurance runners do not end up with big legs, sprint cyclists do, because they're pumping their legs hard to create a lot of force to accelerate quickly - thus, placing a lot of tension on their quads.
But, even supposing this was true, it's still totally impractical. Maybe a workout regimen that replicated this situation could work - but it would take forty hours a week!
yup...you cannot reliably predict how strong someone is or isn't by appearance except for very obvious cases
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Or at another limit, endurance runners do literally thousands of reps of swinging their arms per workout but I would still expect someone who does 100 chin-ups a week to have a bigger upper body.
Manual laborers do tend to have good general physical preparedness and work capacity, so I would expect someone who does manual labor to be able to make better gains if they do resistance train. Only because they can handle more tonnage (sets x reps x weight / week) and more effective volume (hard sets / week). I wouldn't expect that much more on a volume equated basis beyond the selection effect mentioned by @Mewis.
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